The present invention relates to a pneumatic mattress.
A pneumatic mattress is a mattress having a plurality of pneumatic cells which are so connected that sets of them can be selectively and cyclically pressurized and exhausted—or inflated and deflated—in sequence to support a user, normally a patient liable to suffer or actually suffering from pressure sores. Cycling the mattress simulates movement that a patient would make if fit and healthy so as to avoid supporting his/her weight in the same place all the time. Pneumatic mattress design suffers from a dichotomy that separate independent cells held together only by an outer cover make for simplicity and cheapness, whereas integrally fabricated and smaller cells provide support in such a way that portions of the patient's anatomy are not liable to slip between two pressurized cells when an intervening one is deflated.
Pneumatic mattresses are usually pressurized with air drawn from the ambient atmosphere. However, the term is not intended to preclude use of any other inflation gas.
It is known to provide pneumatic mattresses with upper and lower layers of cells. Often these are pressurized and exhausted in phase, that is the cells above each other being pressurized and exhausted together. Advantages of this are not only that in the event of accidental puncturing of a cell in the upper layer, the corresponding cell in the lower layer can guard against the patient being dropped onto a hard bed base beneath the mattress; but also that two smaller cells on top of each other have less tendency to fill the space left by a deflating neighboring cell, thus the portion of the patient supported by the neighboring cell when inflated is more certainly relieved of support by the deflating cell than would be the case if the two superposed cells were a single cell.
It is also known to provide cells as triplets in each layer, with one cell in every three being deflated at any one time.
The present invention is an improved pneumatic mattress.